When Old Tech Meets New Threats: Obsolescence, Mold, and Keyboards
There’s something oddly satisfying about the way seemingly unrelated topics converge when you look at them through the right lens. In recent episodes, Corn and Herman have been circling a theme that keeps coming back: the things we assume are outdated often turn out to be essential.
The Persistence of “Obsolete” Technology
In Episode: The Arc of Deprecation, the hosts explored why certain technologies refuse to die. From fax machines in Japanese businesses to COBOL running banking infrastructure, the pattern is clear: technology doesn’t become obsolete just because something newer exists. It becomes obsolete when every system that depends on it has been replaced — and that takes far longer than anyone predicts.
This isn’t just a quirky observation. It has real implications for how we think about planning, infrastructure, and even household maintenance.
The Analog Problems That Persist
Speaking of things that refuse to go away, Episode: The Mold Survival Guide tackled one of humanity’s oldest adversaries: mold. No amount of smart home technology has solved the fundamental physics of moisture condensation. You can have the most advanced HVAC system in the world, but if your bathroom ventilation is poor, you’re still going to get mold.
The parallel is striking: just as legacy software systems persist because they solve fundamental problems, household challenges like mold persist because they’re rooted in physical reality that no software update can patch.
The Tactile Revolution
And then there’s the keyboard. In Episode: The Tactile Revolution, Corn and Herman dove into why mechanical keyboards are experiencing a renaissance even as voice AI and gesture controls become more sophisticated. The answer, unsurprisingly, connects back to that same theme of persistence: some interfaces endure because they’re matched to how humans actually work, not how we think they should work.
The thread connecting all three topics is resilience through fitness for purpose. Technologies, whether they’re programming languages, building materials, or input devices, survive when they’re well-matched to the problems they solve. The lesson for anyone building anything — software, houses, or podcasts — is to focus less on what’s new and more on what actually works.
